Drama

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, by Karen Joy Fowler

November 18, 2018 by Site Author Leave a Comment

Published 2013

This is a story about the Cooke family, who raise a chimpanzee named Fern along with the narrator of the book, Rosemary up until they are both aged five. The father is a research scientist studying chimp behavior and they live in a farmhouse where they are assisted in taking care of Fern, as well as documenting her every move, by a team of graduate students. Mom and older brother Lowell make up the rest of the family. The story starts in the middle, when Rosemary is in college, about to see her older brother Lowell for the first time in years. Lowell has become something of a black sheep while advocating for animal rights. Most importantly Rosemary wants to find out from Lowell exactly what happened to Fern, who was taken away one day when Rosemary was a child. She suspects that the story he has told her about Fern being taken to a chimp colony is not true, but she has no idea of how bad the truth really is. Let us just say that mistakes were made and that Rosemary must make some tough choices when she finds out what really happened.
While the story tells a lot about chimpanzees and the work that has been done researching their behavior, it is also about a family, a brother, sisters, mom and dad, and how their lives unfold.

The Good Son, by Michael Gruber

November 18, 2018 by Site Author Leave a Comment

Published 2010
Characters:
Theo Bailey, the son
Farid Laghari, the father, son of B.B. Laghari, a judge and tribal leader in Lahore, a Pashtun
Sonia Bailey, the mother who is Polish by ancestry and American by birth, but who, upon marrying Farid, is accepted into the family household and becomes a Pashtun as well.
Cynthia Lam, the language expert working at NSA

The good son, Theo Bailey, is in the army but exactly which branch is hard to say. He goes into places like Afghanistan and Pakistan because he speaks the languages, grew up there, in fact, before his family moved to the US, where his father teaches in Washington DC, and his mother is a writer. The book opens with Theo getting a call from his mother, Sonia, asking him to tell his father that she is leaving the country. This sounds benign but the reason she is asking Theo to relate the news is that she is going back to Lahore, and there is a fatwah out against her which means that going is extremely dangerous. Theo is upset and tries to talk his mother out of going, but it’s useless to try to change her mind and she boards the plane despite his protests. Sonia was born in the US to immigrants from Poland. They work in the traveling circus where Sonia learns to ride the elephants and horses and becomes skilled in handling a deck of cards. All is well until Sonia’s mother is killed by tiger, her father falls ill and finally, the owners of the circus sell out without paying the troupe. Sonia uses her skills as a card dealer to throw blackjack games in Atlantic City to her handler’s favor, until he gets too greedy and ends up being beaten after a winning night. Sonia grabs a suitcase full of cash and heads for NYC, where she meets Theo’s father, Farid, who falls in love, marries her and takes her back to Lahore to the house of his father, where she becomes Muslim, bears Theo and two daughters, and a few years later, goes on her scandalous trips around the Muslim world disguised as a boy. No one would’ve known except that she writes a book about it which is published in the States and becomes very popular. Meanwhile, back in Lahore, the head of the clan, BB Laghari is killed in a bomb attack on his automobile and Theo’s two younger sisters are killed as well. For a long time Sonia believes that Theo was killed as well, but as it turns out a boy from the neighborhood had jumped up on the bumper as it drove by and it was this boy who was killed in the explosion and fire, and not Theo. Sonia has a nervous breakdown and goes into therapy in Zurich, where she becomes a psychiatric therapist herself.
Going back to Pakistan becomes necessary when Sonia has helped to organize a peace talk that includes a wealthy American, a missionary couple, a German, a couple of Muslims, who all meet at a hotel, but then travel to one of the houses belonging to her husband, Farid, which is in Taliban controlled territory. At first everything is peaceful but before they can reach the house their bus is attacked and all of them are taken hostage by rebel forces. They are told that each time the United States attacks and kills a Muslim in Pashtun territory, one of them will be beheaded as revenge. Sonia begins interpreting dreams for some of the captors and is beaten in public on her back and the soles of her feet until the women of the village shame the me into stopping. To punish her further she must choose whoever will be the next victim and does so by having each one draw cards.
There are other aspects to the story, another adopted son, Wazir, who grew up with Theo but who disappeared during the fighting in Afghanistan. And in order to get the US to go in and rescue this group of hostages, Theo, his father and his sister-in-law in Lahore begin communicating on cell phones about nuclear weapons materiel going missing in the area. They are betting on the NSA eaves dropping on their conversation and the calls are quickly picked up by an ambitious analyst named Cynthia Lam. Theo makes plans to go back to Pakistan as a Pashtun in order to find mother.
The plot in this novel has lots of nuances; there’s a lot going on and for the most part, none of it is good. I have to admit that it was tough reading for a while because everything that happens is ghastly, both the past history of the lives we are reading about, and the prospect for a happy ending after the peace-talk group is taken hostage. Nothing much in the first part of the story will prepare you for the ending and there are several quick turns to negotiate along the way. I very much enjoyed this book and hope to read others by the same author soon.

Quiet Neighbors, by Catriona McPherson

November 18, 2018 by Site Author Leave a Comment

Published 2016

Characters

Jude, the main character, a librarian who is on the run from what she believes is the accidental death of her ex-husband’s new girlfriend which she is certain will cause her to be put on trial for murder

Lowell Glen, the older man who owns a book store in Wigtown, Scotland, where Jude ends up after she flees the scene of the accident

Eddy Preston, Lowell’s daughter whom he had no knowledge of until she shows up unannounced on his doorstep the same week that Jude arrives, who is eight months pregnant

T. Jolly, deceased, who left clues to who committed several murders before he died

Lowland Glen bookstore, owned by Lowell Glen, but in sad shape until Jude’s arrival, She is on the high end of obsessive compulsive and cannot help herself from tidying.

“Who runs away to a bookshop?” But that is exactly what ‘Jude’ does when her world collapses after the death of both her parents. A horrible accident takes both their lives and after the funeral Jude flees to an old book store in Wigtown, Scotland she had visited with her husband during happier times. By now she’s divorced and her ex is married to a co-worker he had been seeing during her marriage. When she arrives at the book store, Lowell Glen immediately remembers her and has in fact saved a book she had been looking for in a drawer until her return. She shows up at the door of Lowland Glen bookshop exhausted and emotionally broken, having fled London with nothing but the clothes on her back, her passport and a small mount of cash. She is afraid of using her credit cards, for fear that the police are looking for her and will arrive to take her away if she so much as swipes the magnetic strip. We don’t know why the police are looking for her until much later in the story. But Lowell takes her in, his old-fashioned gentleman style encouraging her to rest at his house until she feels better. The small town seems perfectly safe and Jude takes him up on his offer. Soon, she is working at the bookshop, and being a librarian with obsessive compulsive disorder, she is almost in heaven creating order out of the towering stacks of books, cleaning each one as she goes. Within a few days, more drama comes to the quiet little shop in the form of a teenage daughter that Lowell never knew he had. Eddy Preston’s mother Miranda has just died after a long illness and Eddy is eight months pregnant. She tells Lowell and Jude that the baby is Lowell’s grandchild and the reader gets the impression that Eddy’s story is calculated to force Lowell into taking her in. Not knowing how kind and mannerly Lowell is she didn’t need any story at all, merely having her show up was enough for him to be smitten with her. He remembers a night eighteen years ago when she could possibly have been conceived and takes it on trust that she’s his own daughter. But Jude sees some cracks in the story and doubts that Eddy is even really pregnant, what with the false wombs available now days. When Eddy refuses to have the baby at the hospital and demands that it be born at Lowell’s family home, Jamaica House, where she herself was conceived, Jude’s suspicions grow. But soon Eddy has figured out who Jude really is and the two of them form a pact of secrecy.
Once Eddy arrives she takes over the upstairs bedrooms that Jude had tidied up for herself, but Lowell offers her an old cottage at the edge of a graveyard, where T. Jolly had lived out his final years. There she finds some notes written in the back of books he had ordered for his membership in a local book club. It turns out there had been some scandal involved with Lowell’s father, the local doctor and several of his patients before he died, but the clues are scattered now, buried in the back of the bookshop in books relegated to the dead room which contained dozens of bags of books donated by the community. As Eddy’s due date grows nearer strange happenings occur. Jude receives ominous messages and the cottage is set on fire. The clues almost add up but Jude still needs to search out the final notes in one of the book club entries which still lies hidden somewhere in the bookshop.
An enjoyable read with good characters will keep you guessing.

Go Set a Watchman, by Harper Lee

November 18, 2018 by Site Author Leave a Comment

Published 2015

The story begins with Scout headed home to South Alabama for her yearly visit. She takes the train from New York, the place she has chosen to live in, about as far away as you can get culturally from where she grew up. We see the north, sophistication and city life fade away the farther she goes until the red clay earth shows through along with the poverty, the ‘swept yard’, the old customs all return. Her father’s health is declining and his sister Alexandria has moved in to help take care of him. Scout’s brother Jem, has died a few years earlier but she is met at the train station by Henry (Hank), a protégé of her father’s whom she has known since childhood and who appears to be her beaux, at least during the few days she is home in Maycomb. He wants Jean Louise to marry him, but she knows that would mean giving up her New York City lifestyle, moving home and raising kids, being the good wife, an end to her aspirations to be a writer. Scout won’t tell Hank no, but she won’t say yes either. Jean Louis up until this point has no disillusionments about her family. Her auntie drives her insane with her Victorian morals and expectations, but that is not a change from the way she has always been, and she still loves visiting with her Uncle Jack, an eccentric retired doctor whose passion is English literature, and who is at least truthful with her even though he has no real power in the community the way Atticus does.
Harry (Hank) had become a second son to Atticus since the death of Jem. As Jean Louis settles into normal life back at home her whole world is turned upside down when Atticus and Henry leave on a Sunday afternoon for a meeting at the courthouse. She begins tidying up papers that her father has been reading and finds a racist pamphlet. She decides to go down to the courthouse to see what the meeting is all about. She climbs the stairs to the balcony and watches, however this proves to be her undoing because she sees Atticus agreeing with the racists about what should be done in their southern community to avoid the ‘troubles’ that other southern cities are having. Atticus has agreed to take on a case involving a relative of Calpurnia’s, the black woman who raised her and Jem after their mother died. This relative has killed, albeit accidentally, a white man and the town leaders are afraid that the NAACP will get involved as they have in many other cases where a white jury will sit in judgment over a black man. In contrast to the famous trial in To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus is only taking this case to keep the NAACP out and does not believe he will win. Jean Louis is literally sickened by what she hears and, in a daze, walks to her old house out of habit, but it has been torn down and an ice cream parlor put up in its place.
Poor Scout has a hard time coming to grips with how her father and Henry are behaving. She feels lost without her guiding light, her father, whose moral compass has always served as her own. In fact her uncle Jack tells her towards the end that she must begin to live her life by her own standards instead of substituting her father into her own consciousness. When I read the book I didn’t think it was impossible that Atticus and Henry were trying to do the best they could given the circumstances. Having grown up in the South I understood the outrage that Jean Louise felt at what she thought was happening. I also understood that Atticus and Henry, who lived there and nowhere else, must behave differently in order to remain members of the society with a chance of making some kind of change. Scout’s world had been black and white and now it had suddenly, in just a few days, turned to many shades of gray. Her uncle Jack tries to convince her to come home to live, to take part in the fight instead of running back to New York, above the fray so to speak.
While the story of Go Set a Watchman is appealing, thoroughly believable and well-written, the comparison with To Kill a Mockingbird is difficult. What I am reading now suggests that the latter was a first draft of the former, which I find hard to believe. I would rather think that while Watchman was written before Mockingbird, the two have not too much else in common. I suspect that Mockingbird was developed from another story entirely. It’s difficult to separate them entirely since both are drawn so heavily from Harper Lee’s childhood. I can also see why Harper Lee held on to this manuscript even though she didn’t publish it. It’s so personal; a native Southern woman’s coming of age against the backdrop of the old South during the civil rights movement.
Although not in the same rank as Mockingbird, which portrays what men should have been rather than maybe what was, it is never the less a worthy story. It would be interesting to know how the manuscript ended up in the safe deposit box or why she never tried to publish it until her health was failing. I’m glad it was finally published because it gives us another glimpse into the small town American South during a very important period.

Drood, by Dan Simmons

November 18, 2018 by Site Author Leave a Comment

Published 2009

‘Drood’, caught my eye as it was intended to do. The author well knew that the single word, part of the title of Charles Dickens’ last, alas unfinished novel, would compel me to reach for it and open its cover. And while the book is about this mysterious character that so many of us will forever remain curious about, it is much more about the narrator, Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens. Collins is a fellow writer who was popular during the Victorian period about which he writes. Wilkie Collins’ brother Charley was married to one of Dickens’ daughters, Katey and the two men were very close for many years. The story starts with the Staplehurst train accident which Charles Dickens barely survived in 1865. According to the Collins, this is where Dickens first encountered Mr. Drood, a caped figure of hideous appearance, with lidless eyes and mere slits where the nose should be. Dickens goes among the injured, dispensing brandy and carrying water, but Drood is also there, possibly trying to hypnotize the injured. Drood disappears but Dickens seems to be fascinated by him and engages Wilkie to pursue him into the great underground sewers of London. He enlists the help of Inspector Fields, who considers Drood to be the sinister mastermind behind dozens, if not hundreds, of unsolved murders in London over the past few decades. Fields assigns a working detective, Hibbett, a huge bear of a man armed with loaded pistol, to accompany the two writers into the seedy parts of the city. They do find Drood, or he finds them, it’s difficult to say which. Collins is becoming more and more addicted to laudanum, an alcohol drink with ten percent opium mixed into it which he uses for pain from gout. This substance was widely prescribed during the Victorian era for all sorts of maladies. Dickens used it at times as well. Collins describes his increasing use of the drug and when the effects no longer dull his pain he turns to the opium dens first discovered on his jaunts through the Great Oven into the underground with Dickens, in pursuit of Drood.
I won’t tell more of the story in case you want to read it for yourself. Dickens’ love affair with actress Ellen Ternan, his estranged wife Catherine, his children, are all there. Collins himself had an unusual family life, living with Caroline and her daughter but having children with another woman at the same time, neither of whom he ever married. If you are a Dickens fan, then you will enjoy it, if not, I would think it might be tiresome. The book is long, over 700 pages, and it’s hard to tell if what Wilkie is saying is the truth, or if it is some wild opium-induced fantasy. Mesmerism, which Charles Dickens was a follower and practitioner of, plays into the story as well. With all of these variables it’s hard to tell sometimes if Collins’ narrative is dream, fantasy, or reality. But it’s very well done and worth the endeavor. I’m not sure how much of the Drood character as portrayed by Simmons is based on Dickens’ ideas or entirely made up. Either way the book is fascinating for those Dickens readers who have gone beyond the more popular works like Great Expectations and Oliver Twist to the later ones David Copperfield and Our Mutual Friend.

Don’t Believe a Word, by Patricia McDonald

November 18, 2018 by Site Author Leave a Comment

Characters:
Eden Radley, an editor for a publishing house in New York City, whose Mother Tara, has committed suicide after murdering her son, Eden’s half-brother Jeremy, who has an incurable disease.
Flynn Darby, the father of Jeremy and husband of Tara, and an author
Hugh Radley, Eden’s father

Eden Radley does not have a good relationship with her mother, Tara. Eden has never forgiven Tara for abandoning her and her father and marrying her ‘soulmate’, Flynn Darby when Eden is still a young girl. After her new marriage Tara has a child, a buy named Jeremy who sadly is afflicted with a fatal disease. The family moves to Cleveland so that Jeremy can receive treatment from a renowned doctor there. But Eden receives the news that her mother has killed her son and taken her own life at the family’s home, while the father was out of town. Eden takes time off from her job as an editor at a publishing house in New York City and goes to Cleveland for the funeral. What she finds there is anything but a clear case of murder/suicide.
This book kept me guessing the whole time. Was it the father/husband or even Eden’s father? Was it a jealous lover? While the plot did some stretching of what I would think was entirely possible, if you’re willing to go along with that, it was very intriguing. Lots of suspects in a story about a girl who wants to find the truth and also come to terms with her sad relationship with her mother. Finding out what happened becomes a way for Eden to make up for her coldness towards Tara and the brother she refused to acknowledge while he was alive.